[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[John Day]

Just out of curiosity could some explain how the UN got involved with ISO 3316?

The connection is not obvious to me.

Thanks.


At 12:07 +0100 2011/02/18, Jaap Akkerhuis wrote:
>    
>     (Eric? wrote)
>
>     No one from this list nor anyone else I tried to contact could give me a
>     definitive answer on when this decision was made. I had to try 
>and figure it
>     out myself. It appears that something changed between May and 
>July of 1984.
>     In July, a draft RFC was posted that included the ISO-3166 list for the
>     first time. Four months beforehand, Postel first announced to Namedroppers
>     that he felt there should be countries represented somewhere in the
>     hierarchy. This came after a fairly significant amount of lobbying by all
>     kinds of people, but many of them had OSI sympathies.
>
>My collegue Piet Beertema was involved in the discussions about
>which list to use. I remember that among other possible lists where
>the UPU list and the list of Road Vehicle signs (or something like
>that). The last one has variable length codes which didn't make it
>attractive.  The ISO list was indeed interesting because the UN is
>involved.  And the 2-char instead of the 3-char codes where attractive
>because there would be no clashes with existing domains (com, edu,
>net).
>
>I alsways think that the whole DNS became popular independent of
>the transport protocol due to the uumapping project and similar
>stuff (the JANET gateway etc).
>
>	jaap